Tuesday, July 06, 2010

I have been thinking … maybe way too much … these past months. The summer especially has been a time of contemplation. I have had a need to come to terms, to find a way of thinking about “things” that is tolerable.

over beer with a friend…

We all die. To everyone there comes a death. For those who love the dying that death is never fair or good enough or kind enough … It is always cruelty that our world should be diminished and that the ones we love eclipsed. The death of the loved is always a portent of our own end.

To each of us comes a death and never can that death satisfy.

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All is metaphysics … while all may be knowable, there is never knowing enough to hold it all. The mind is at once infinite and finite … its capacities endless yet never all encompassing so that no matter how much is known there is ever the unknown but not the unknowable.

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There is the “stuff” of being. It is being and it is thought. Thought is pattern and organization it is inherent to a being which arranges and rearranges, endlessly playing out every possible configuration, every possible reality. To ask if there is intelligence in this design is a misconception, intelligence is the substance of being.

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There is no time.

We can only know now because we are in this configuration and it is necessarily this configuration that we know. We can only know the now we are in.

If one could travel back in time, time would either collapse, all nows becoming now, or multiple nows co-existing, segregated from one another. If I go back in time and change my own past then I become two … twins out of joint … One of me with my “original” history and one of me with my “altered” history and those two can never be rejoined. Once a thing has happened it can never unhappen and that is to say it has always been.

This is the nature of infinity … all possible moments beyond our ability to hold them all exist. It is only our knowing of now that creates time.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

I realize now the importance of competitionWithout competition there is nothing to push againstNo standard against which to measure the quality of production

There are infinite reasons not to achieveInfinite reasonable reasons not to give over to …

All will understand the limits of our successBecause there are reasonsA thousand reasonable reasonsThat all our friends will understandAnd commensurate Over the slings and arrows Which impede our progress

Sunday, January 24, 2010

It is easy and it is difficult to know how to surrender and how to give permission.

We live with the unseen witness and we ascribe to this witness many judgments. We believe that somehow if we suffer others will know our suffering and we will gain worthiness through this suffering. Somehow through debasement, by prostrating before others we prove our goodness. Those few exempted from these interior recriminations are those who through some fluke of rearing or through some internal dialogue have managed to persuade themselves, or are raised to believe, that they are worthy … some believe this in excess.

It is nothing more than a contemporary self-flagellation with the same degree of usefulness. While the diseases it spreads are perhaps less virulent than the plague they are none-the-less damning in their outcomes.

No doubt the content of this witness’s character was formed in the early days of Christian guilt. It is no doubt the descendant of those cultural beliefs that allowed the aristocracy to believe that God had ordained them to their places and had just as firmly placed their lessers rightly beneath them. Conversely, those lessers, equally convinced of their place, were satisfied to have a sense of ego/goodness fed through the virtues of their self-sacrifice. (I am made better than you in my suffering.)

Always it is a balance … how to silence this witness and reconstruct the being in some more helpful form… to know and accept that we are somehow worthy of our happinesses.

It is true that faith must be internal … it is the content of that faith we must reconstruct.